Faster-Than-Light Travel
Faster-Than-Light (FTL) engines are capable of moving information and beings at a speed faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, which is 299,792,458 meters per second ( denoted as 1.0 c, where c, celeritas, is the Latin word meaning speed). Civilizations capable of FTL flight have long-dominated the galaxy, but every civilization has collapsed before they were able to travel to another galaxy. One limitation of all FTL engines is a refractory period that is proportionately as long as the trip to the destination. This proportion changes for each civilization over time as technology advances. However, this meant that engaging an FTL engine for a long voyage would keep travelers unable to re-engage the FTL again for a long time. Because of time dilation, minutes or hours may have passed for the traveller, but from the view point of an observer outside the FTL-craft, the FTL-craft would be sent days, weeks, months, or years into the past. The faster a traveler gos, the quicker your journey would seem and the more “extreme” it would feel to return to “normal” after they arrive at their destination). From the perspective of an observer, it would appear as though someone disappeared at one point in the universe as they reappeared in another point in the universe and hung frozen for a period of time, gradually speeding up to “normal”. From the perspective of the traveler, they moved forward through space for a period of time but when they arrived at their destination, time would appear “catch up” with up with the traveler at initially breakneck speeds until it gradually returned to a more “normal” pace. In the time before the three intelligent civilizations met, they took longer voyages to the farther reaches of the galaxy without the fear of running into another race. If they took a long voyage that lasted weeks or months (or years), they would be without the capability to use their FTL for a commensurate amount of time. The first civilization to reach FTL technology was the Sarnam, followed by the Tegga Beings, and lastly the Felzari. The Sarnam have the fastest FTL drives and can take the longest sojourns at FTL speeds, meaning that they conquered the most territory out of any of the three civilization. The Tegga beings have a faster FTL drive than the Felzari, but they are also limited to shorter distances. The Felzari have the slowest FTL drive, but can go longer distances without needing to disengage their FTL drive. Once the three intelligent races started encountering one another more frequently, they learned that taking long voyages would lead to the risk of being destroyed or captured by another race. If they take too long of a jump, they are left stranded for a long time in enemy territory without being able to escape. So as time wore on, the intelligent races learned how to maximize the length of each jump while minimizing the number of jumps that it took to get to their destination. This meant that the movement of each ship in the galaxy was restricted by the threat of assured destruction at the hands of another race. They could only leap a few light years at a time and areas of the galaxy under contention between one or more races would restrict transit to a near-standstill. Each of the three intelligent races had forged treaties with the other two races that secured their right to harvest extraium from nearby stars and outlined the rules for how and when a race could lay claim to a suspected type III star. Extraium, the rare element that powers FTL can only be found in the novas of the massive stars common in the very beginning of the universe. These stars are very rare in present times. It cannot be synthesized by any of the intelligent races and so they must seek out these increasingly rare stars and siphon the element from the star during a precise point in the supernova. This is the main hurdle that keeps nearly all civilizations from spreading outside of their galaxy; the element cannot be synthesized outside of a star or outside of this very particular time in the universe, so civilizations must harvest it from the only source they have. And because these stars are hard to find, the size of the civilization is based on how fast it can travel and how far they can travel to reach the next star that will fuel their starships. However, because these stars are the progenitors for the chemical elements that gave rise to almost all of the chemical elements in the universe, consuming them means that space-faring civilizations could prevent complex life from arising on other planets, or at least deprive them of the fuel that they need to develop FTL space craft when they reach a sufficient point in their technological development. As demand for this element increases, the number of suitable stars available within the reach of the intelligent civilizations dwindle and the civilization collapses when they cannot cheaply acquire an adequate supply of the element to power their economy. Because FTL craft can travel backwards in time, intelligent civilizations would monitor the visible universe in search of signs that a type III star went supernova and would dispatch a ship out to the star moving faster than the speed of light. The ship would arrive appropriately before the supernova in time for the ship's crew to siphon the extraium from the star using magnetic confinement of the supernova remnant. Only the earliest civilizations in the beginning of the Universe had access to enough low-metallicity stars to sustain their civilization long enough to spread to other galaxies, but low-metallicity stars are the source of the elements needed to form life, so it was rare to find a civilization that began early enough in the age of the Universe to exploit the higher density of low-metallicity stars. Civilizations that exploited FTL technology inevitably collapsed when their supply of stars ran out, but new type-III stars would form at a steady-but-declining rate, meaning that a civilization would collapse and after several million years, new type-III stars would form and allow another civilization the chance to build their interstellar society until they too exhausted their resources and collapsed. Yet, the civilizations that eschewed FTL fared no better. It took them thousands of years just traverse the distance of one habitable planet to another. If they were discovered by a hostile race with FTL, they were all-but resigned to destruction. Because of the sub-luminal speeds at which they could progress through space, these species would often drift apart genetically only to evolve new forms unrecognizable to their brethren whom they left behind.